With various technologies, today's workforce is becoming increasingly mobile. Various telecommunications devices have enabled employees to send and receive mails, as well as receive and make telephone calls to other employees from remote locations. As mobile devices are gaining additional functionality users are relying on them more and more as mobile workplaces.
These increasingly complex mobile environments have created difficulties. For example, with existing mobile technology, it is difficult to ensure information is received by mobile users in a timely manner. It is also difficult for mobile users to access up to date work product. Different mobile users become aware of and have access to updated information at different times and as a result workers efforts can overlap. Multiple technologies may be employed in order for a mobile device to receive all the information needed to respond or to perform assigned tasks. Commonly several technologies are employed or the same technology is employed repeatedly to ensure information has been received by all mobile users in a mobile environment. This situation increases organization cost and causes inefficient use of time, effort and resources.
A mobile user in a given mobile environment would benefit from the ability to access and update the most current version of shared information within their mobile environment. This would be useful in a variety of industries specifically those having mobile work environments with multiple field workers. For example, all field workers in a given mobile work environment could view and update the status of work assignments in a shared queue, and receive new work assignments in conjunction with data needed to perform those assignments. Each mobile user could work more efficiently from this up-to-date view including changes as they are made by other users. This would be useful in areas including, but not limited to, field maintenance work, real estate development, construction and oil field development. Some existing devices may have mechanisms for manual data exchange between mobile users but such mechanisms are inadequate for these types of system wide applications.